SE Life-Cycle Building Blocks

Introduction

MITRE systems engineers (SEs) orchestrate the complete development of a system—from a need, through operations, to retirement—by applying a set of life-cycle building blocks. SEs are expected to understand and work with fundamental building blocks for engineering systems, regardless of the specific life-cycle methodology used. They are expected to define systems conceptually, transform user needs into system requirements, and develop and assess architectures. They are expected to compose and assess alternative design and development approaches; develop test and certification strategies; monitor and assess contractor efforts in design, development, integration, and test; and assist with field deployment, operations, and maintenance.

Background

All systems engineering models and processes are organized around the concept of a life cycle. Although the detailed views, implementations, and terminology used to articulate the SE life cycle differ across MITRE's sponsors, they all share fundamental elements.

For example, Department of Defense (DoD) Instruction 5000.02 [1] uses the following phases: materiel solution analysis, technology maturation and risk reduction, engineering and manufacturing development, production and deployment, and operations and support; however, this conceptualization of the system life cycle is by no means unique.

ISO/IEC 15288 [2] is an international systems engineering standard covering processes and life-cycle stages. It defines a set of processes divided into four categories: technical, project, agreement, and enterprise. Example life-cycle stages described in the document are concept, development, production, utilization, support, and retirement. The International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) uses a consistent approach in its Systems Engineering Handbook [3, p. 25].

The V model [3, pp. 27–28] shown in Figure 1 is a common graphical representation of the systems engineering life cycle. The left side of the V represents concept development and the decomposition of requirements into function and physical entities that can be architected, designed, and developed. The right side of the V represents integration of these entities (including appropriate testing to verify that they satisfy the requirements) and their ultimate transition into the field, where they are operated and maintained. The model used in the SEG is based on this representation. For each phase, we have written articles that succinctly describe the major activities in each cycle. They are summarized below.

System Architecture

Once the requirements are expressed and folded into a management process, a system architecture can be described. The architecture will be the foundation for further development, integration, testing, operation, interfacing, and improvement of the system as time goes on. In the system architecture articles, we discuss various architecture patterns (e.g., service-oriented architecture), architectural frameworks (e.g., DoDAF [architectural framework]), and formal processes for developing architectures. Articles in this topic area include Architectural Frameworks, Models, and Views; Approaches to Architecture Development, and Architectural Patterns.

Implementation, Operations and Maintenance, and Transition

Finally, to ensure a successful transition of the system into the field, plans and procedures must be developed for operations and maintenance. Because the technological underpinnings of a system are constantly changing, product improvements, including the insertion of new technologies, must be planned for.

Other SE Life-Cycle Building Blocks Articles

This topic is a staging area for articles on subjects of relevance to SE Life-Cycle Building Blocks but that don't neatly fit under one of its other topics. In most cases, this is because the subject matter is at the edge of our understanding of systems engineering, represents some of the most difficult problems MITRE SEs work on, and has not yet formed a sufficient critical mass to constitute a separate topic.

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